The whole room holds the model

Ben Swift · 6 August 2026

The search sheets are the cutouts activity with the cutting taken out, and they scale to a room. The CLI shuffles a corpus and deals it round-robin into one page per participant, so no two sheets are the same. You call out the last token written on the board, everyone scans their own sheet for it, and hands go up wherever there is a match. Pick one of those hands at random and you have your next token.

The useful part is what the hands do without being told. Every token pair in the text was dealt to exactly one person, and the deal spreads each context across as many people as it will go. A continuation that happens six times puts six hands in the air; a rare one puts up two. Nobody in the room has been taught weighted sampling, and the room performs it anyway. Pick at random rather than taking whoever shouts first, though, or you are sampling the fastest reader instead of the text.

The other part is that nobody holds the model. No single sheet can continue the text on its own. The model exists only across the whole room, and if somebody is away, some contexts draw no hands at all. That is not a metaphor for distributed parameters: for the twenty minutes it runs, it is literally where the model is.

Four sets are ready to print, in Green Eggs and Ham, Peter Rabbit and The Cat in the Hat for 24 people, and Australia for 40. Print them single-sided and hand out one each. The first page is the briefing for whoever is running it, and every page after that is a different participant’s sheet. Each set is sized for a group, because a missing sheet takes its share of the model with it. The tools page will build a set from any text you paste in.

Building these turned up a problem with the generated colour palette. Sheets set their token pairs at 16pt rather than the cutouts’ 36pt, and at that size, colours the metric called comfortably distinct kept reading as the same colour. Max-min OKLab ΔE counts a lightness step the same as a hue step, and a scanning eye does not: on a small glyph, a lightness step reads as that colour again, darker. The generator now enforces a minimum hue separation as well.¹ Every ready-to-print PDF has been rebuilt with the result.